politics & rants robchurch on 21 Jun 2007 09:46 pm
We can’t leave now…
With Gordon Brown’s imminent coronation as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, a lot of people are demanding that he promise to withdraw our troops from Iraq.
The problem is, he can’t, and neither could another leader, in good conscience, do that. Iraq (and Afghanistan) has an unstable and vulnerable government, and we’re going to be stuck in there with the Americans for quite some time sorting out our mess.
We had a choice about going in, and our leaders took the wrong one. We have a moral choice about leaving, but let’s hope our leaders do the right thing for a change. The US and UK have made beds for themselves, and now we must lie in them.
on 22 Jun 2007 at 4:47 am 1.Nick Jenkins said …
Yeah, but there has to be some point at which you say “enough”. Vietnam took around 12 years (from the early 60’s to 1973) from large-scale-intervention to withdrawal. I think we’ve grown less patient and less trusting of our politicians since then, so I doubt we’ll wait much more than half that long now. It’s been over 4 years already, and many people are starting to say “enough” (at least here in Australia, seeing as we got sucked into the Iraq War on false pretenses too, although not to the same scale as the US & UK). So sooner or later someone will get elected who vows to pull the plug, and it’s hard to argue morality to citizens who have simply had enough of seeing their soldiers come home in body bags from a war which is both illegal and immoral (illegal under the UN charter, and immoral because the arguments used the justify the war of WMD + terrorist links + torture were all either completely wrong, or invalidated by the use of torture by the US).
on 22 Jun 2007 at 1:52 pm 2.robchurch said …
Well, I think the point isn’t that we’re doing the right thing by being there, but that we’re bloody stuck for a few more years now.
This is almost certainly going to become the UK’s Vietnam.